Director Jeff Preiss’s first feature film, “Low Down,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category this week. The film explores the life of jazz pianist Joe Albany (played by John Hawkes), the virtuoso musician who struggled with heroin addiction, through the eyes of his young daughter Amy (Elle Fanning). “Low Down” is based on a memoir by Amy Albany, who co-wrote the film with Topper Lilien.

“Low Down” uses historical recordings of Joe Albany’s music, but Hawkes also learned to re-enact his performance. “When John is at the piano, what his fingers are doing on the keyboard match Joe,” Preiss said. “His technique as an actor is unique and he was able to focus that mindpower and pull it off.”

Preiss, who is based in New York, talked with Speakeasy about Hawkes, adapting Amy Albany’s book, and his hopes for “Low Down” at Sundance.

This is your first feature film. What is your background?

I came out of the art world actually and made and continue to make films that get shown in gallery contexts and through that, I became a director of photography. Through my work as a director of photography, I began also directing music videos and television commercials. In 1995, became a partner in Epoch Films, a New York-based commercial production company.

The movie is based on Amy Albany’s memoir. How did you come to adapt her book into a film?

Amy is someone that I met about 10 years ago. She was actually on my crew on a commercial shoot. I was a fan of her father’s music and when I found out that she was the daughter of Joe Albany, I was so interested to hear about her growing up in Los Angeles and became almost addicted to her storytelling. The memoir in some ways came out of that time, this conversation that we were having about Hollywood in the ’70s and about music, and about Amy’s interest in being a writer. Just that simple possibility of collecting stories that were so amazing. So I was first involved in the production of the memoir and the book was published by Tin House and right away optioned by Bona Fide [Productions], by Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa. This had nothing to do with me or with my intention to at any point in time direct an adaptation. It was just such a beautiful book and it suited their model for valuable material.

Jeff Preiss on the set of ‘Low Down’

It was just after a few years of their thinking about putting the production together, one way or another, I had a conversation with Albert and it just turned into eventually making the film together, along with my partner Mindy Goldberg at Epoch Films. They didn’t even quite understand that I had so much to do with the writing of the book. They knew that I knew Amy well and that I was really interested in the material and loved jazz and Joe’s music. But they only found out after we were down the road of producing the film that I was there pushing for these stories to be known from the start.

How was the process of telling his life through her eyes, via a visual medium?

Yeah, it’s all these sort of stages of adaptation and distillation because the book has a kind of scope that the movie couldn’t have, and that’s usually the case with any adaptation. But what was interesting about memoir is the way it had as much to do with the sense of Amy’s memory. Amy’s perspective and her memory of these events that were in the distant past. And so I think when we started transforming the stories into what worked as a screenplay, we really liked the sense of the almost fairy tale quality that the writing had. When Amy digs back to her childhood and re-visualizes these stories in his head, they had an almost dreamlike quality. So what we ended up doing as a distillation is we set the movie in the time of Amy’s life that hinged from the end of childhood to the beginning of adulthood. So that the movie could fall into two parts — one that did have this kind of memory, dream quality to it the way we think of our childhood, and then because of separation she had with Joe, when he left for Europe, a sudden clarity that the character Amy has in the second half of the movie, when Joe comes back. But the movie’s very much Amy’s observation of Joe, rather than the story of Joe. It is the story of Amy observing Joe so it becomes a portrait of Joe inside of a movie about Amy. This was the way we felt we could be very faithful to the style of the book, but faithful to an interpretation, which is required in any adaptation.

Does John Hawkes play music in the film? Did he have to learn Joe’s music?

He did. Virtually all of the music — there’s a couple exceptions where for technical reasons we had no other choice, but in principle, we wanted all of the music to be historical recordings of Joe’s playing. Not only did John have to learn these parts, but learning the part of a virtuoso improviser. It was an act of superhuman concentration and discipline that he was able to pull that off. I have to say, the first day where we shot a musical performance, we all believed that this process was going to work. But we also hadnt’ seen it work yet. We did the first take and the camera dropped down to John’s hands as he was playing, and it was jaw-dropping. It was so perfect. And then we cut and it was the sound of a stampede down the hall, of everyone from the video village running to the set to express their utter disbelief that it just happened.

Did he play music before?

Not in a serious way. He’s a very, very good musician, he plays guitar. But to go from really not a pianist, and not having been a jazz musician, to embodying what Joe Albany was capable of is a feat that defies belief. The thing that I realize is that he did it with a kind of acting technique. We had an incredible jazz musician, Ohad Talmor, to help train him. Ohad’s an old friend of mine, he’s been a champion of Amy’s writing for nearly as long as I have. He had long ago, just out of fascination with what we were doing, started transcribing and learning Joe’s solos, so he could eventually teach them. When we put them together, I remember Ohad realizing it was different than teaching a student of music how to accomplish something like that because John brought his abilities as an actor to it.

How do you hope “Low Down” will be received at Sundance?

It’s the kind of thing I take so for granted. I never thought to put it into words. I come from a tradition of filmmaking that takes the idea of pure cinema very seriously. We shot “Low Down” for instance on film anamorphically to produce this experience that is very unique to the art of cinema. So my hope is just simply that people enter into that. I’m not so concerned about a good reaction or a bad one because I think to enter into the film is to have that experience. So, I’m just hoping for open hearts and eyes to feel the love that the cast and the crew put into it.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.